Summoner gets no new pets in expansion

[FreeLancer4]

The appeal of the XI Summoner was the plethora of different support (a few healing too) and burst abilities and having cool looking avatars and flashy moves. The downside was obviously the abysmal auto-attack dmg from the avatar, the long'ish delay between being able to use avatar abilities and the none existent kit for the actual Summoner besides the avatars, forcing them to often take the role of a gimp healer of sorts.

They have essentially flipped the XI Summoner into the current XIV Summoner.

The pet(avatar) has decent auto attack damage, can use abilities in swift succession (if only they were useful), and the Summoner now has a kit to utilize. However the pets look bleh, lack any real burst and support abilities and have taking the role of the of the XI Summoner, except being a gimp healer there a turret for extra damage. The interaction with your pet has vastly diminished and options reduced to a fraction of its XI counterpart.

I think what most were ideally looking for was a middle ground of these extremes. The decision to make them into niche roles is fine and I feel like I can live with the egi/glamour system to come, but they need a rework of pet abilities/potencies to make them stand out, to be something outside of a turret (Bring back pet Party Buffs!). Giving the summoner stuff to do was great but at the cost of almost totally neglecting our pet it loses any semblance of being a -pet- job. Address these and I'm certain the majority of the summoner community would be pleased, or at least complain a helluva lot less.

[Mondhimmel]

If people want FFXI summoner- umm go play ff11 its still there.. i checked out videos of it ..all the summer is doing is standing there as the summon attacks- granted that the summons were huge- the overall job looked boring as hell.

play the lvl100+ summoner and come back... you have fulltime job now


SE excuse......

S?: Sorry but you cant become new egis- you have a melee,a tank and a rng egi

1 day later
S?: Sorry but you cant become new tank job- were have 2 tanks
Sorry but you cant become new healer- were have 2
Sorry but you cant become a dmg job- you know the rest

Give the Smn more dots, enemyspells and and and, but call him not more Smn.
Is more BLU as a pet job....

[Alberel]

Sure, enough people have explained again and again how easy it would be to give each pet a more specific role to have situational uses, but almost none have actually given specific examples which are viable and balanced. A pet with AoE auto-attacks is a specific example but considering that no other job in the game has an AoE auto-attack, does that not seem a little unbalanced? Now we're back to the Mythflox days only instead of BLM or gtfo it's SMN or gtfo.

We also get vague comments like "make all the pets DPS with various party buffs to differentiate them". Okay, so now you have all the summons that essentially do the same thing (sounds like a glamour) while giving various different party buffs or mob debuffs. The problem would be that it will quickly be determined which is the 'best' party buff and if you aren't using the 'best' one then you'll be chastised (haven't SMNs complained ad nauseam about essentially being forced to use Garuda?) Furthermore, why not combine several of the buffs/debuffs onto one of the 3 current summons and implement the glamour so that the individual summon is more powerful, and a summoner doesn't have to lose DPS to resummon mid fight?

Lastly, you're essentially asking SE to spend significant more time designing and balancing SMN than it does for the other jobs. Implementing and maintaining abilities for 6 (or more) unique summons plus the summoner itself.

I seriously struggle to understand why so many people cannot comprehend how much of a balancing nightmare they are asking for while offering no viable suggestions. Sure you had one with an AoE Auto-attacking egi... now let's get 5 more and make sure that they don't overpower summoner, feel unique, and are each viable enough that people will choose them for a variety of situations. It's a much more daunting task than people make it out to be, especially for just one of 13 jobs.

Considering you went to such lengths to simply reword my post against me despite missing the entire point I'm just going to assume you're unable to actually discuss this properly. Other games have achieved what players are asking for. Other games have done it in a way that is balanced. I have made plenty of suggestions in plenty of threads but people such as yourself love to just blindly shoot them down due to a lack of ability to think beyond what we already have.

For the record we have many jobs with what amounts to an AOE auto-attack already. BLM, DRG, MNK, WAR and other jobs have spammable aoe abilities with much reduced potency that is higher dps beyond a certain number of targets. There is no reason why an egi cannot have an equivalent ability. Oh and guess what, MCH turrets have exactly that so it's clearly doable. You clearly aren't actually trying to think about this at all.

When it comes to more dev time being spent on one job over others I take it you haven't noticed that's how balancing works? WAR, NIN and DRG have all been the focus of a balancing pass with some pretty significant skill changes as part of that. Why are you suddenly so opposed to SMNs getting the same needed treatment?

I'm sorry but you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

[Talia_Hailwind]

The pets can't handle the snow.

[Nestama]

Address these and I'm certain the majority of the summoner community would be pleased, or at least complain a helluva lot less.

I am almost positive that the (silent) majority of the SMN community is fine with how SMN is. The one's who aren't are most likely the vocal minority.

[Pluvia]

Considering you went to such lengths to simply reword my post against me despite missing the entire point I'm just going to assume you're unable to actually discuss this properly. Other games have achieved what players are asking for. Other games have done it in a way that is balanced. I have made plenty of suggestions in plenty of threads but people such as yourself love to just blindly shoot them down due to a lack of ability to think beyond what we already have.

For the record we have many jobs with what amounts to an AOE auto-attack already. BLM, DRG, MNK, WAR and other jobs have spammable aoe abilities with much reduced potency that is higher dps beyond a certain number of targets. There is no reason why an egi cannot have an equivalent ability. Oh and guess what, MCH turrets have exactly that so it's clearly doable. You clearly aren't actually trying to think about this at all.

When it comes to more dev time being spent on one job over others I take it you haven't noticed that's how balancing works? WAR, NIN and DRG have all been the focus of a balancing pass with some pretty significant skill changes as part of that. Why are you suddenly so opposed to SMNs getting the same needed treatment?

I'm sorry but you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

Ninja has never had any major rework in the last patches drgs was barely anything major as well really the only major changes came to warrior so i don't see how that's more dev time spent on them really i guess at this point you could say smn are getting more dev time owing the the fact that they're making a glamour system for them

[Nestama]

And WAR desperately needed those changes, otherwise no one would have included WAR in their parties. Ever.

[Havenchild]

I'm sorry but you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

I just think the current suggestions that I've seen for additional egis are a waste of time.

An AoE auto attack? Ok if something dies fast enough that Contagion won't really matter for dungeon content, ok that just invalidates Garuda / Ifrit in that scenario.

If it's too strong? Might even beat Garuda in AoE scenarios.

I think the person who doesn't understand is yourself. The balancing involved with it to keep all the pets viable at the same time, would be a never ending process as some that emerge will hurt those before almost all the time. The same has happened to several other games WoW included, that had a pet-esque class. Whatever emerges the strongest wins in the end. In other MMOs, the only time other pets were validated at the same time, usually had to deal with the caster having to choose a particular skill tree, and that tree incorporating skills to be used with that particular pet. That doesn't work the same way here for obv reasons.

I'm also curious about all these countless MMOs, that have managed to have numerous Pets and maintain all of them at the same time and none overshadow the others while still using a battle system / skill system like FFXIV.

Also with your WAR example, there is a very big difference between was is needed and what is wanted.

Your argument for SMN is what you want the class to have, not what is needed by the class.
The adjustments made to WAR were needed to even bring it on par with PLD in end-game content.

[Allyrion]

They didn't even rework WAR.
They buffed their kit to bring them in line.
Huge difference.

Though it was a very big buff.

[Nestama]

A massive buff, yes. Their only defensive cool down was Foresight (Storm's Path didn't even give mobs the 10% Damage Down debuff and Holmgang was just a leash that didn't have the added "can't drop below 1" trait. WAR's were useless before 2.1 came out. Something which SMN has never suffered). Vengeance was some weird "Rough Skin" ability and Inner Beast just dealt damage and absorbed 300% of the damage dealt.